Intel Core i7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 5, 2021 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 14nm
- Xe-LP
- Rocket Lake
- Cypress Cove
- i7-11700K
Gaming Tests: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
Average FPS | ||||
95th Percentile |
Gears is the one test where at our 1080p Maximum settings it shines ahead of the pack. Although at high resolution, low quality, although all five CPUs are essentially equal, it still sits behind AMD's Ryzen APU.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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dihartnell - Thursday, March 11, 2021 - link
Traditionally Big.Little designs don't work that way. They either are running the big 8 cores or they are running the little eight cores but not at the same time. The type of workload determines which is run when. Personally don't think it makes a lot of sense In desktop.Jasonovich - Friday, March 12, 2021 - link
And whats the point of the little chip big chip design, when TMSC will very shortly produce in mass the 5nm and in 2023 the production will move to 3nm.Alderlake is based on the worse case scenario and has been introduced to buy Intel time until it resolves the shortfalls of their 10nm production.
lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
You're really confused if you think Atom doesn't help Intel here. Tremont performance per watt and performance per die area is really quite excellent. Also worth remembering that nearly every Atom you've ever seen has had mediocre memory and cooling paired with it. I don't expect Intel to "win" off of this move but it'll help for as long as Intel doesn't have chiplet ready.The_Assimilator - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Even if it does - and Intel's current record on 10nm suggests it won't - by that time AMD will have had over a year of Zen 3 reining unopposed, and Zen 4 well on the way.The_Assimilator - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
*reigningm53 - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
291W is for AVX512 workload. The rest of the CPUs here won't match it's performance on AVX512 workloads no matter how much power you give them.But if you are not interested in AVX512 workloads then don't look at the AVX512 power consumption.
scineram - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Already beaten in DigiCortex.RaistlinZ - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Ouch. :(terroradagio - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
It is incredible bad form and bad taste to release a review before anyone else and before Intel has provided the new microcode update to resolve the early issues. All because Anandtech wants to get out early.And your defense by way of saying well we got it at retail and therefore this doesn't matter is a joke. Terrible publication.
Makaveli - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
lol that power consumption really bothering you ?